The board holds eleven panels now. Between them the drywall still shows, pale rectangles the light picks out, each one the size of a monitor I do not have yet.
I measure them without meaning to. Standing at the stove I catch myself sizing a gap, deciding whether the flat panel from last month would fit it or whether that space wants something smaller. The gaps have started to feel like the missing part rather than the space between parts. A wall that is mostly screens reads as a screen with holes in it.
The panels come the way panels come. Off a curb. Out of a neighbor’s garage. The thrift store on the highway that takes them by the truckload and does not test them, so half are dead and I carry the dead ones back out to the car and the live ones up the stairs. It is not fast. It was never going to be fast. The wall is nine feet by something and a monitor covers a little more than a foot of it, and if you want to know how many that is, I could tell you, but I have not let myself do the multiplication all the way out.
Because the number is the end of it, and I am not sure I want the end of it. A full wall is a finished thing. A finished thing you stand in front of. An unfinished one you keep feeding. I think I would rather keep feeding it.
The bare patches give off no heat. You can feel it with a hand held flat, moving across the board — warm over the glass, cool over the drywall, warm, cool, the wall breathing in squares. In the lowest gap, near the baseboard, the paint is still the paint. Nothing has warmed it. It is the one rectangle up there that still remembers being just a wall.